This is going to be a strange story coming from me, but it is a
true story and it seems particularly good to tell on Halloween.
As you might guess I do not believe in ghosts. But I would be
willing to be convinced by evidence. And there was a time when we
were getting some strange behavior in our house.

We were recently watching the grand old ghost story film THE
UNINVITED. We were giving it a watch before we lent it to a friend,
and I was dragged into it again. This is the one that was made in
1944 and has Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey buying an old house in
Cornwall. They find that there is a voice crying at night. They
realize, quite against their skeptical natures, that they house has
a ghost. It is one of the best ghost stories on film that I know
of, probably because it functions both as a mystery and as a ghost
story. It is not there to make the viewer jump, but instead to
tell a mystery story with cold ghostly chills.

But what it reminds me of is that much the same thing happened to
me. As I say, I don't believe in ghosts, I never did, but we did
have some ghostly phenomena associated with our house. We bought
the house from someone else and they, of course, never mentioned
that anything strange had ever happened there. But the odd thing
was that two of the doorframes had stains of bloody fingerprints.
The doorframes on the back door to the patio and one on the
doorframe leading from the garage to the laundry room had red
stains with fingerprints. I am sure the substance was blood. It
was that brownish red. I had concluded that the man we bought the
house from was particularly unhandy in the yard and in the garage.
It was just a detail they had forgotten when they cleaned up the
house. But it was fun to leave there to point out to friends to
claim that there had been some dirty doings afoot in the house.

Then things took a turn for the more bizarre. It started one
winter night. Evelyn and I were reading to tire our eyes before
we went to sleep. Then I noticed a flowery fragrance wafting by.
Was it my imagination? I thought I smelled perfume in the air.
Now Evelyn uses no perfume. Neither of us likes it. But I
certainly know the smell and I smelled perfume. It was a sickly
sweet smell. And got stronger. It smelled like one of the mail
ladies at work, who do like perfume just a little too much, had
walked into our bedroom.

"Are you wearing perfume," I asked Evelyn.

"Do you smell it too?"

"Yes, I assumed it was something you were wearing."

"I don't wear perfume."

"I know that. Did you just put on deodorant?"

"No, did you?"

Well, we established that neither of us thought we had contributed
the smell. But clearly someone had. We each suspect the other,
but we went to bed a little uneasy. Even then I was already
thinking about the eerie parallels to THE UNINVITED. Was it the
smell of mimosa? But the fragrance of perfume did not return.
There was only the one incident--for about two months. And just
when we decided it had been our imagination it happened yet again.
The fragrance of perfume was noticeable on the air. Again we
established that neither of us knew what was causing it. Again and
again the incident would reoccur. It was not frequent. There may
have been something like fifteen incidents over maybe two years.
(What do you call an incident? It isn't a "sighting." It is an
unexplained smelling.) This combined with the fingerprints on the
doors and left us with an eerie feeling every time. It just
didn't make any sense. I never lost the belief that there was a
logical explanation, but I never could figure out what it was. It
is an inexpressible feeling to sit in bed on a cold winter night
and wonder if a phantom sweet smell was going to make its presence
known. I don't think we even investigated since I was not sure
what to look for.

Then it was Evelyn who found the answer. But she had an
advantage. The answer came from the bathroom off the master
bedroom, which Evelyn uses and I generally do not use. At that
time when we had overnight visits we would let the visitor have
the master bedroom, since it is the most comfortable bed. One
guest had used Evelyn's bathroom and accidentally left behind a
piece of perfumed soap. It was small enough that Evelyn never
noticed it. But the two women who were guests do not share
Evelyn's and my distaste for perfume. The piece of soap went
unnoticed for all these months, except when random air currents
wafted its fragrance into the bedroom. That was a chance
occurrence, hence the sporadic nature of the incidents. And as
for the bloody fingerprints, gee, I don't know. I wonder if there
was something funny that happened at Leeperhouse. [-mrl]

For quite a while I have been claiming that the two best horror
film directors currently working are Guillermo del Toro and
Kiyoshi Kurosawa. While other horror film directors seem to feed
off of older ideas and styles, these two are inventive. And of
the two Kurosawa is probably the more inventive. Truly his films
are weird enough that they frequently leave the viewer behind. I
have seen his SEANCE, CURE, and PULSE, and would definitely
recommend CURE and PULSE. His new film is certainly a weird
story, though not strictly speaking in the horror genre.

With A BRIGHT FUTURE Kurosawa says that he is making a non-horror
film. However if this is not a horror film it is something very
much akin. It certainly is bizarre.

Yuji and Mamoru are two workers in a laundry who are friends. As
a hobby Mamoru has a project to take poisonous jellyfish and adapt
them so that they can live in fresh water. Their supervisor at
the laundry picks these two out to be friends in spite of their
disinterest in them. He starts insinuating himself on them more
and more. He visits Mamoru's apartment and watches sports on
Mamoru's television. When he sees the jellyfish he wants to poke
fingers into its water. Yuji is ready to warn him that the
jellyfish is very dangerous, but Mamoru gestures to Yuji not to
interfere. But nothing happens. The boss discovers that the boys
almost let him be killed and realizes they hate him. He fires
them both. Yuji is so angered that he goes to the boss's hose to
kill him, but when he gets there he discovers that Mamoru has been
there already and has murdered the boss.

Mamoru is convicted of the murder and sentenced to be executed.
In prison Yuji and Mamoru's long-lost father visit Mamoru. Yuji
determines to finish Mamoru's project to adapt the jellyfish to
fresh water. Mamoru commits suicide in prison, but Yuji is still
dominated by Mamoru's vision. The dead man's spirit still seems
to dominate Yuji and Mamoru's father.

In spite of Kurosawa's claims and the title, this is a very bleak
film. The jellyfish is filmed hypnotically and the film carries
us to the conclusion that seems inevitable. This film may not
have the appeal of Kurosawa's CURE or PULSE, but it nonetheless is
like no other film I have ever seen. Kurosawa's greatest gift is
his originality and uniqueness. [-mrl]

This is a French slasher film directed and co-written by Alexandre
Aja. In spite of a slight continental feel and a little lesbian
relationship, this film is solid cliche from the early days of
slasher films. It is one cliché after another, and then at the
end the writer plasters on an ending that is logically
inconsistent with the rest of the film.

HAUTE TENSION opens in a very standard way. Two young women visit
a farmhouse where one's parents and brother work. The audience
has seen that a killer is operating in the same area, driving an
old truck. On our first view of the killer he tosses a woman's
head out the truck window and it falls in a cornfield. This is
just to announce the killer's proximity to the characters. We
have a few scenes intended to make the audience jump, but which do
not seem to advance the plot. Then the action starts.

There is a knock at the door. The owner of the house opens the
door and is sliced and diced. The killer continues his way
through the house like a rolling Vegematic killing everyone he
finds. These sequences are very violent but not much new. There
are three people in the house than the two young women, but
somehow you know the others will be dispatched quickly so the
killer can concentrate on terrorizing the two main characters.

Eventually there are some twists in the plot, but just enough to
make what we have seen inconsistent. The ending raises a lot of
questions that cannot really be answered by the story. This is
not a film for fans of the subtle or the original. [-mrl]

(Spoiler Warning: I saw this film knowing only the title. It was
a much better film for that. For those who insist on knowing what
a film is about before paying admission, I recommend you read as
little as possible in advance.)

The timing of the film SHATTERED GLASS could not be much better.
After the recent journalism integrity scandal at the New York
Times when two top editors resigned, it would be hard to find a
more timely feature dramatic film about a current issue. This is
the story of Stephen Glass, the young influential hotshot feature
writer for the New Republic, who was the center of a firestorm
when it was discovered that he had taken certain dishonest
shortcuts on a story he had written.

The film follows the scandal step by step and describes The New
Republic's fact-checking process and a good deal more of the nuts
and bolts of the journalism business. (Actually fact checking
really is a good deal more rigorous than portrayed in the film a
reliable source informs me. Actually it was this dude who was
behind me in line for the next film. He actually knows someone
who does fact checking and I am sure he wasn't lying.) The
writing is crisp and intelligent. The story is compelling.

Stephen Glass is played by Hayden Christiansen who is best known
for playing Anakin Skywalker in the "Star Wars" series. Here he
plays a successful and highly influential man seduced and doomed
by his own promise. He is committed to producing more brilliant
material that he can actually provide. Rather than admit the
shortfall and disappoint others and himself, he chooses instead to
mislead. He fills gaps with invented facts. Yet he was cool
under pressure and was well-liked by all his colleagues. The same
cannot be said for Chuck Lane (Peter Sarsgaard), the new editor at
New Republic, who is not popular with the writers and who must
guide his magazine through this crisis. We see what has happened
to Glass as a flashback from a visit to his high school English
class to be honored by his teacher.

Journalistic integrity is a concept that is a little abstract and
the story involves no guns, chases, or explosions. Billy Ray has
written and directed a surprisingly exciting film very different
from just about anything else out there. He gives us a very nuts-
and-bolts explanation of what is not really a nuts-and-bolts sort
of business, the writing of opinion. It also looks at the
question of how do we know what we know is true. The question of
just when this is happening actually hangs over the entire film.
This is a surprisingly intriguing film. [-mrl]

This is a film that plays by its own rules. In spite of initial
appearances there is no plot. Instead it is a series of long
vignettes of local life in a suburb of Nara, Japan.

Two brothers Shun and Kei are running through the streets of their
town. In the process Kei disappears. We are told that years
later that Shun is found but the matter is not pursued in the
film. We see other long scenes of the family. In one Shun and
his father take part in the planning of a dancing ceremony that is
part of a local ritual. Later in a long sequence we actually see
the ceremony. The film shows it for a repetitive ten minutes or
more. Another sequence shows a woman giving birth.

This is an award-winning film but at the performance I saw, many
walked out on it. At 99 minutes SHARA is not a long film, but it
does not offer very much to the casual viewer. [-mrl]

I'm in two book groups at our public library, the "original" group
(which does all sorts of books), and the science fiction group.
So almost every month I have a couple of books chosen for me by
other people.

But this month I think I chose both of them. I know I chose
Nikolai Gogol's DEAD SOULS, because who else would have suggested
it? And why had I read it? Because Robert Silverberg recommended
it in a column in ASIMOV'S a few months ago. (Some of this I
discussed in an earlier column that ran on 01/24/03.) Given that,
you're probably thinking that it must have something to do with
horror (since you know that while Gogol didn't write science
fiction, he did write horror stories). But you'd be wrong. The
title refers to serfs who were dead. In particular, a landowner
in 19th century Russia was responsible for taxes on all the serfs
he owned as of the last census until the next census, even if they
died in the interim. Into town rides Chichikov, who offers to buy
these "dead souls" from landowners at very reasonable prices. I
won't tell you why, but the reason is not the main point of the
novel. Rather, it is what some call a "picaresque" novel, full of
episodes and characters to entertain you without necessarily
having a strong plot, similar to some of Charles Dickens's works.
Most people found it surprisingly amusing, except for one woman
who said she sat down all set for a heavy Russian novel and never
got out of that mindset. (When I was reading some of what I
thought were the funnier descriptions, she asked if I could come
over to her house and read the book to her!)

And I think I may have chosen Robert J. Sawyer's CALCULATING GOD,
based on the group's request to do something recent, not too long,
and that the library network had enough copies of. We all thought
the book had a lot of ideas--maybe even more than a single book
should hold. There was first contact with aliens who have proof
that God exists, and immortality, and gun-wielding religious
fanatics, and .... Actually, in my opinion, Sawyer should have
left out the gun-wielding religious fanatics. I got the
impression that he put them in because he felt the book needed
some action instead of all the people and aliens just talking, but
I didn't feel that way. I also thought that the details seemed
somewhat artificially constructed so that the story could progress
exactly as Sawyer wanted. For example, the aliens have enough
technology so that Sawyer can justify why the government has to
let the main character be the only contact with them, but not
enough to solve his main problem. I liked all the philosophical
discussions among the characters; I just wish there had been more
of that. [-ecl]

Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Quote of the Week:
Certainly it is a world of scarcity.
But the scarcity is not confined to
iron ore and arable land. The most
constricting scarcities are those of
character and personality.
-- William R. Allen